By Ben Reinhard
Reports of the death of Christendom are, it seems, somewhat exaggerated. Indeed, and contrary to all expectation, Christendom seems to be enjoying a renaissance of sorts in the second quarter of this century: as a term, at least, if not yet as a social and cultural reality. Even this conceptual renaissance, however, seems significant. Only a decade ago, Christendom was a decidedly fringe concept: few knew even the proper pronunciation of the word; fewer still had any interest in discussing its relevance for life in the modern world. Something strange has happened, however, in the past five years. First, in 2020, came Msgr. James Shea’s justly acclaimed From Christendom to Apostolic Mission, arguing that Christians must adopt new evangelistic paradigms in a post-Christendom world. Perhaps prematurely: no sooner had Msgr. Shea announced the end of the age of Christendom than a new, young, and largely online generation rediscovered it. Today, Christendom is apparently everywhere. It is discussed, of course, in books and journals and blogs, engaging the intellects of writers like Paul Kingsnorth, Sebastian Morello, Michael Warren Davis, and Joshua Charles. In some quarters, the concept has escaped from page and screen into the real world; post-liberal Catholics now occupy positions of power from county councils to Washington, D.C. Intellectually engaged Christians no longer ask what Christendom is but whether it can be revived – or, perhaps, if it should be.
For all that Christendom has become a much-discussed topic in recent years, consensus on these most important questions has proved elusive. From all appearances, the gulf between those who come to praise Christendom and those who hope to bury it is only increasing. These heightened contradictions can be seen with special clarity in the case of Christendom College, a small and fiercely Catholic liberal arts college in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. As the educational offspring of Triumph magazine and Brent Bozell’s Christian Commonwealth Institute, the college has been dedicated to the restoration of Christian society since its founding in 1977. Today, the college is thriving, with its magnificent new chapel towering over commuters on I-66 and its dorms filled to capacity as it prepares to celebrate 50 years of “restoring all things in Christ”: a win, it would seem, for the renewal crowd. But the college’s success has drawn the negative attention of the critical camp; most notably, of Mark Massa, S.J., of Boston College. In his Oxford University Press-published monograph Catholic Fundamentalism in America, Massa mocks the college and its leaders for “Dreaming of Christendom in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” accusing them of sectarianism, fundamentalism, and parochialism – and much worse besides. This squabble in Catholic higher education is, alas, merely a concrete representative of the larger conversation. The same debate is repeated, with minimal variation, everywhere the idea is discussed today.
It is unlikely that a broad consensus will emerge any time soon. As those attuned to these discussions know, these disagreements reflect deeply-rooted differences in ecclesiology, anthropology, ethics, and politics. It may nonetheless be possible to take a first step towards clarity by recognizing that linguistics also plays its role in the ongoing confusion; at least part of the problem is semantic. However modern commentators may feel about the eclipse of Christendom – whether they view it as lamentable or desirable, inevitable or reversible – they tend to agree on one thing: they all ascribe to the twentieth-century understanding of the term. Though different writers may offer slightly different formulations, the great majority would agree that the word ‘Christendom’ refers to some form of Christian civilization or culture. As the historian Warren Carroll has it, Christendom is “a Christian society, shaped by Christian principles and truth to the fullest extent man’s fallen nature permits, a society that publicly acknowledges Christ as King.”
Allowing for Carroll’s favorable spin, this is a wholly acceptable common-use definition. But while Carroll accurately captures how the term has been used in the twentieth- and twenty-first century, his definition does not do justice to the full historical richness of the term. This is to be regretted, as the word Christendom has an illustrious history. It is almost as old as written English itself, and occupies an important place in England’s legal and ecclesiastical history. Massa suggests that this history may illuminate our contemporary discussions. On his account,
“Cristendom” is an Anglo-Saxon term thought to have been invented in the ninth century by a scribe (possibly in the court of King Alfred the Great) translating Paulus Orosius’s History of the Pagans, written in the early fifth century. That busy scribe was seeking a term (non-existent before his efforts) to express the idea of a universal culture in which Christ (and Christ’s Church) held direct sway over every human creature.1
But while Massa is right that is helpful to go back to the Old English roots of the term, he is wrong in almost everything else he says. Orosius did not write a history of the pagans, but against them; the Anglo-Saxon translator was not a mere hassled copyist, but (as scholars have shown) an educated, creative, and humane scholar; though cristendom is attested first in his work, the translator almost certainly did not invent the word (as England had been thoroughly Christianized two centuries before he wrote, it is unlikely that so basic a term had not already entered the lexicon). It is enough to make one wonder what else Massa’s Oxford editor had on his plate when this passage crossed his desk. Even Homer may sometimes nod, but here he seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel.
These errors are mere trifles, however, compared with Massa’s central howler. The translator of the Orosius did not use cristendom “to express the idea of a universal culture in which Christ (and Christ’s Church) held direct sway over every human creature.” In the first place, it is doubtful whether he would have possessed a concept of a universal monoculture and more doubtful still that would have approved it. Had he read his Bede – and he almost certainly had – he would have known that cristendom could and did flourish in diverse national cultures. More seriously still, this is not at all how the translator uses the term cristendom. While the term occurs in various contexts through the Old English Orosius, it most frequently translates Latin terms like tempora Christiana or Christiana religio, occasionally it refers to an individual’s privately held faith (as when a persecutor attempts to make a man abandon his cristendom). For these reasons, Malcolm Godden, the most recent translator of the Orosius into modern English renders cristendom, consistently and simply, as Christianity.
Those familiar with Old English will immediately recognize that this is, in fact, the correct translation. For the rest, a brief and simple digression into Old English morphology is in order. The word cristendom was formed by affixing the adjective cristen (a loan from the Latin Christianus) with the suffix -dom, which is used in Old English to create an abstract noun of state. Nouns so created are on occasion simple calques of pre-existing Latin nouns ending in -tas. Some of these terms are alive and well in modern English (freodom, ‘freedom’ = libertas); some are obsolete (haligdom, *‘holydom’ = sanctitas). Cristendom is of course exactly this sort of word, it represents precisely the Latin Christianitas.
This can be seen with perfect clarity in other early Anglo-Saxon witnesses to the term, especially in the works of the great 11th-century Benedictine, lawmaker, and statesman Archbishop Wulfstan. Wulfstan had a special fondness for translating pre-existing Latin texts into Old English. Happily for our purposes, this leaves little doubt as to the precise meaning of his words. As we might expect, his homily Be cristendome is a translation of an original Latin homily De christianitate. If the titles alone were not sufficient to establish meaning, the content of the homily would. Wulfstan begins with a direct appeal to the audience: they must know how to give an account of their cristendom. What follows is a simple instruction on the fundamentals of Christian faith and practice, Creed and Decalogue. No Christian empire here, only basic catechesis.
In its original historical use, then, cristendom means Christianity, no more and no less. However then did the term come to mean, not Christianity simpliciter, but a social order that many modern Christians view with suspicion and even hostility? The answer is found in the Anglo-Saxon age, and indeed in the pages of the first writers to use the word, especially Wulfstan. The Archbishop and his fellow clergy were well aware of the extraverted character of their religion, its evangelistic and social demands, and they knew all too well that their own salvation hinged on their faithfulness to this mission. And so they thundered and excommunicated and coaxed and pleaded, they advised kings and drafted laws and washed the feet of the poor. Above all, they exhorted all men, whatever their state, to do their duty to their cristendom. Laymen were encouraged to hold and keep (healdan) their cristendom and to pursue it in their daily lives, bishops and priests to build it up (aræran) by every means at their disposal. Most telling of all, however, was the king’s duty to simultaneously extend and enlarge (miclian and mærsian) the kingdom and cristendom together. In this statement, cristendom has become conceptually linked with a political unit. Elsewhere, the pairing is made explicit. Kingdom and cristendom, Wulfstan tells us, rise and fall together. In this way the term cristendom thus begins to expand to include geographical and cultural notions as well. When cristendom is directly opposed to hæþendom (both “heathenism” and “the lands where heathenism is practiced”), the semantic expansion is complete. Thus the modern, secondary sense of the word Christendom was born.
Here we see a curious phenomenon. The writers who brought cristendom into English as the word for “Christian religion” are the same ones who extended it to a Christian social-political order, an order they themselves were active in constructing (Patrick Wormald, last generation’s greatest historian of early English law and politics, credits Wulfstan with creating and preserving the English polity that still exists today). If this blending of theology, sociology, and politics is puzzling to us as moderns, it is only because we have attempted to divide what the medievals saw as a unity. In his classic Prayer as a Political Problem, Cardinal Daniélou observed that the Church has “a duty to work at the task of making civilization such that the Christian way of life shall be open to the poor,” that is, the masses. The Anglo-Saxons would have agreed with him.
The semantic shift of cristendom came not because those who used it sought to justify a Christian world-state, nor because they were too muddle-headed to distinguish what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, but because they discovered (or sensed) a real relationship between the two meanings of the word. Seeking Christianity, they found Christendom. And if linguistic history is any guide, the Anglo-Saxons were not the only people to have this experience. Such ambiguity is not restricted to the English term cristendom. Thus, when Christianity entered the English language in the high Middle Ages (a loan from Anglo-Norman French) it was used in exactly the same way – as a term for both the Christian religion and the region of the world that practices it – and was used so well into modernity. Variations of Christianity continue to be used this way in modern European languages.
So persistent is this linguistic blending of Christianity and Christendom that we may almost suspect that it is relevant, not merely as a curious fact of historical Christianity, but as a revelation of a fundamental truth of the religion, that Cardinal Daniélou was right when he wrote that “there can be no radical division between civilization and what belongs to the interior being of man.” On the contrary, there is a real and essential connection between Christianity and Christendom, one so powerful that neither thought nor language can keep them neatly separate.
Returning at last to our contemporary Christendom debates, where does this foray into millennium-old linguistics and ecclesiastical history leave us? It seems clear to me that this invites a change in thinking for both the “renewal” and “critique” parties; for now, however, I would be content with a change in definition. To whit, wherever Christian religion is truly practiced, and to the extent that it is practiced, there is Christendom: in any civilization, state, family, or soul. Clarity on this point is essential for successful navigation of the challenges of our age – or any age. To those who live, as most of my readers surely do, in the post-Christian West, it reveals how much work we have to do. True Christianity is not a religion of pure contemplation, tending towards quietism, it is a lively, fighting, and even crusading faith, one that makes demands on the temporal order. Purely private religion, individual perfection, the naked public square – these are not acceptable options for the serious Christian, and never have been. The Church is called, as the philosopher and critic Sebastian Morello so correctly points out, to make disciples of all nations. Though our record in the past century has been admittedly abysmal in this regard, this is no reason to abandon the call.
But this is only one side of the coin. If a robust understanding of Christendom places heavy demands on those living in a secular age, its demands on a structurally Christian society is even greater. It bears repeating: wherever Christian religion is truly practiced, and to the extent that it is practiced, there is Christendom. From the one to whom much is given, much is required. To the publicly Christian society, family, or individual, Christendom is therefore the call to continual conversion, to become more deeply and perfectly what we profess to be. Only thus can we avoid the charges of hypocrisy and pharisaism so often levelled at Christian societies, and only thus can we save our souls. A broad and vague cultural Christianity (as in 1950s America) is not enough to make a society truly part of Christendom, nor is public observance of the liturgical year (as in modern Austria). We reflect that thirteenth-century Europe is, to some modern commentators, the Christian society par excellence. And yet, if Dante is any guide, the nine circles of hell were richly supplied with that century’s sons and daughters.
This is how things must be in a fallen world. As Daniélou pointed out 60 years ago, no merely earthly social order, however perfect, can be fully identified with Christianity as such. The one is by definition natural and temporal, the other is the “divine irruption” of supernatural grace. But it is essential to the Gospel that this irruption happened, and continues to happen, in history, through the Incarnation and the life of the Church. In the course of this history, many Christendoms have been created. Some of these (the Middle East and North Africa in the eighth century, Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth) have ceased to be. Some may yet be restored. The essential mission of the Church in the world, however, remains the same.
This realization should govern the way we proceed. We may, as Msgr. Shea urged, cease to rely on institutional structures and adopt more humble, practical, and flexible evangelistic strategies. I would go so far as to argue that this is among most urgent pastoral concerns of our day. We cannot, however, talk about moving from Christendom to apostolic mission. Considered correctly, these are merely two aspects of the same thing, the attempt to fulfill the Great Commission, even unto the end of the age.
Ben Reinhard is professor of English and faculty associate of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he also serves as the director of the Humanities and Catholic Culture Program. He writes and teaches on the Inklings, medieval legend, and the thought of Christopher Dawson. His most recent book, The High Hallow: Tolkien’s Liturgical Imagination, was published in 2025 by Emmaus Road Publishing. He lives in Steubenville, Ohio with his wife and five children.
